The Year According To Moths and Giraffes: 2023
Every year is a great year for music! We’re back to tell you all about the brilliant artists we’ve written about in 2023, with snippets of our interviews and a sampling of their music. One of these pieces even made it into our top ten most viewed articles ever! But first, outside of our regularly scheduled programming we also had some other things happen along the way…
From the start of the year, we introduced a new feature, recommending other artists we’ve written about who you might like at the end of each article (find our previous roundups at the bottom of this page!). Moths and Giraffes were cited on Wikipedia for the first time in reference to the rock trio Snaggletooth, whose debut EP we wrote about in 2021.
We made lots of new friends in the Spring when M&G helped to promote a new annual charity livestream called Charitindie. Hosted by songwriter and producer Cayt W, the 2024 stream is already in the planning stages!
Shortly after this time, many of the artists involved with Charitindie also contributed to a piece we wrote in the summer celebrating the music of Taylor Swift. In August, I was interviewed for Canvas Rebel, chatting about the origins of Moths and Giraffes, how this website has grown and one of our biggest pieces to date.
Also in the summer, I spent some time working with London duo Just Kids in the lead-up to the release of their mini-EP ‘photographs from a past life’. As well as helping to co-ordinate the release, I helped them shoot music videos for ‘parking lot’ and ‘want to believe’, both taken from the mini-EP. Just Kids are busy writing and will return in 2024!
This year has also seen the rise of AI across creative industries. In some of our Q&As with songwriters and producers, we asked about their thoughts on the use of AI in music. Here we compiled their answers in a short essay within this piece, as well as some thoughts of our own.
In 2023, we reached the milestone of 200 articles, hosted music video premieres, wrote career retrospectives, and reviewed our biggest gigs so far at Hyde Park’s British Summer Time. Our brilliant year in music began with the first of many album reviews…
‘There is something so anti-creative about passively absorbing hateful material online because it inspires those feelings that only more and more fear and resentment can fulfil. Especially when it saps all your will to interrogate and question and explore, which I think are natural and positive corollaries of partaking in the songwriting process.’ – Billy Lunn on ‘Influencer Killed The Rock Star’ (The Subways)
Kicking off 2023, we wrote about the long-awaited new album from Welwyn Garden City trio The Subways. Much had changed since the release of their self-titled record in 2015, including a line-up change, with their new album being the last to feature founding drummer Josh Morgan. ‘Uncertain Joys’ marked new territory for The Subways, which saw bassist and vocalist Charlotte Cooper experimenting with keyboards in a new sound.
Having reviewed the album’s first single ‘Fight’ in May 2021, and their post-lockdown return to the stage in September that year, the album came highly anticipated by Moths and Giraffes. Our review not only took in each of the album’s tracks, we also reviewed the accompanying B-Sides (including the fierce Cooper-led ‘Oi You Boy Bands’). A favourite from ‘Uncertain Joys’ is their latest single, the long-overdue criticism of influencer culture entitled ‘Influencer Killed The Rock Star’.
“‘Hurt Like No Hurt’ involved me lying down by the River Thames in Greenwich and whilst filming scenes every time an Uber boat passed there was an avalanche/waves reaching the river shore and covering me with river water. This happened quite a few times while filming scenes until we witnessed what was causing it. Ultimately we got the shots without the river getting in the way!” - Jova Radevska (YOVA)
It was Halloween in January for the release of YOVA’s ‘Hurt Like No Hurt’ EP, featuring a biting music video, starring vocalist and lyricist Jova Radevska in transformative werewolf make-up and prosthetics. It was the latest in a string of artistic videos from the duo of Radevska and multi-instrumentalist Mark Vernon, who told us more about the making of this and earlier songs from their album ‘Nine Lives’. YOVA have continued playing live in 2023, as well as releasing new singles entitled ‘Feel Your Fear’, ‘Maybe’ and ‘The Dreamcatchers’. The duo are set to launch their second album in March at The Troubadour in London.
“I wrote ‘Winter’ about two and a half years ago, so I unfortunately have a less than vivid recollection of the writing process. What I do remember is the first line of the song I nailed down, which is from the final verse: ‘nothing much has changed so winter must have always been this cold.’ This line specifically is about losing track of what it feels like to be upset or sad or depressed when you’re in the good times, so the dark times hit a bit harder when they come back. I was in a very tumultuous and volatile relationship when I wrote the song and a lot of it is metaphoric introspection about what it means to be happy in a relationship.” – Delenn Jadzia
After Christmas is gone, you’ve already been in Winter for a while. You see the sun for maybe a few hours a day, and each year you forget what this feeling is like. You yearn for some warmth, some sunshine. Delenn Jadzia puts all of these thoughts into their single ‘Winter’, but is it actually about the season, or something much closer to home?
Delenn has had a very busy 2023, releasing several singles entitled ‘Finding God (with LSD)’, ‘Romantic Suicide’ and their most recent, ‘Cyanotic’. Jadzia’s writing has also expanded to feature songwriters from the Charitindie Collective, including Uncle Emmington, Secret Pigeon and Copeland James (who writes the music for ‘Cyanotic’).
‘All of the songs started as just voice and piano, but I knew I wanted to experiment with production and arrangement - there were obvious sections that needed other instruments to help progress the song and tell the story. They were all written during the pandemic when there was a lot of tension around certain subjects, fortunately I had the time to really delve into that tension. When I listen to them now they sound intense, but it was an intense time.’ – With Sun
In February, we wrote about the latest work from With Sun, the musical project of songwriter Alice Hale called ‘Sometimes we go Backwards’. The three-track EP was a change of direction for With Sun, as she worked with producer Philip Michael Jack to soundtrack her piano-based compositions with crashing drums and wailing guitar. With significant moments in all three of its songs, the EP’s closing track ‘If Her Gardens Burn’ is a warning of the increasing division among the human race. In October, Hale returned to her core sound with the single ‘Holding’, a gorgeous acoustic song about how romantic relationships can change over time.
‘This one has been on my hard drive for a while! I wrote & produced the bulk of it in the summer of 2021. I wasn’t going to release it, but something kept pulling me back to it. I ended up finishing it a couple of months ago. So glad I listened to my gut and put it out into the world!’ – Maya Lakhani
Having written about her first three singles in 2022, we continued with the next release from the rock orientated songwriter and producer Maya Lakhani. ‘Torn In Two’ was her most blistering yet, and came at a time when Lakhani was beginning to be recognized for her great songwriting! It’s been a landmark year for Maya, who has garnered BBC Radio 1 airplay, supported Reverend and The Makers in London, played The 100 Club and performed a brand-new song live on BBC Introducing Sussex and Surrey’s Live Lounge.
"It's a cosmic lullaby about the relationship between time and desire: can we feel the passing of time if we have no desires at all? Also, a deeper meaning of 'desire' could be 'to be away from the stars'. What do we hold onto, what is it that keeps us alive and makes us feel at home even under a starless sky? My answer is 'the heart'. Heartbeats can be left unheard almost all day, and yet, undetected, often underrated, they create our rhythm of life, a way to measure our perceptions, and our dreams. Together with Demian, we once imagined the universe as one giant, immense Being with an invisible heart, because it is so big that it may contain the galaxy we live in. Sometimes things seem invisible only because they're huge, way bigger than our comprehension." – Jolanda Moletta (She Owl)
In February, we premiered the new music video from Italian multi-instrumentalists She Owl, the title track from their third album, ‘Invisible Heart’. We’d previously written about vocalist Jolanda Moletta’s work on the debut album of GALÁN / VOGT, plus her collaboration with Henrik Meierkord for Ambientologist called ‘Incanto’. So we were more than familiar with her gorgeous voice and atmospheric visual presentation. ‘Invisible Heart’ was no exception, driven by the duo’s shared piano and guitar performance. Both Demian Endian and Moletta comment on the grounding piece, Endian saying of its origins, “‘Invisible Heart’ appeared like those blades of grass on the balcony on the seventh floor.”
‘This album is about me saying a lot of things, but also about the silence and stillness in between the words. The title track is so hard for me to encapsulate into words, because that song is absolute feeling to me. It’s all the tangled feelings I struggle to say, and I guess the album is me trying to begin to pick that apart.’ – Evie Asio
After writing about the earlier singles from South-East London artist and producer Evie Asio called ‘Available’ and ‘Turning Time’, we were over the moon to finally hear the album its creator had spent so long refining. ‘Contending & Contention’ was part of an emotional journey for its maker, combining genres and exceptional performances across these nine songs. In our full album review, we called it ‘a masterpiece, worth the years of toil and emotional upheaval to arrive at a timeless document of growth within the ever-changing landscape of early adulthood.’
‘Like most people we lost momentum a bit during the pandemic, we had just done some really nice gigs and felt like we were on the right track, and then covid hit. So we kind of lost our balance and direction a bit. But slowly getting back into it with this single dropping now and another one in about a month.’ - John “Alex” Alexander Ericson (The Ghost Of Helags)
Following the release of their debut album in 2021, Swedish duo The Ghost Of Helags quietly worked on their follow-up, releasing their first single from the new record in early 2023 called ‘Looking For Mary’. We praised the crisp programmed drums and glistening synths, describing the track as ‘a stunning slice of yearning dreampop.’ The song was inspired by an encounter with a stranger outside a Berlin nightclub, who gave Alex Ericson details of their drug addiction and struggles, before disappearing back into the night…
‘Obviously recording always allows for a bit more layers and details that are not necessarily reproducible live and on the other hand you always have to decide on one final version. So it’s fun to add little things in the studio that won’t be there on stage but playing them live allows you to do things differently every time.’ - Andi Sommer (Kara Delik)
In March, we hit our 200th article when we wrote about the mini-EP from Berlin DIY trio Kara Delik called ‘Singularities I’. Its lead single is the eerie ‘Strange Attractor’, escalating with a spoken word vocal from drummer Eilis Frawley and an equally unsettling music video. The flipside, ‘Iterations’ features a mechanical vocal from bassist/keyboardist Andi Sommer, while both showcase the unique saz playing from Baris Öner. Each member of this trio offers something vital to the sound of Kara Delik, with this mini-EP conjuring a moody tone that continues through a further three ‘Singularities’ volumes, released throughout 2023.
“The B-side 'TikTok Twat' is a silly song about social media. I downloaded TikTok a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about and, unsurprisingly, it was shit, people miming to things and jigging about in a really cringe effort to accumulate likes, or shares, or whatever it is. But it seemed the absolute natural progression of the world order, which is quite a sad thing really. I know I'm a complete idiot for not getting the band on there because it's such a powerful marketing tool but I just feel I've completely reached my limit; Instagram is soul-crushing enough, I just cannot handle any more.” – Richey Ostrowski (Furrowed Brow)
After writing about the Furrowed Brow singles ‘Punctual Punk’ in 2021 and ‘I Threw The Bathwater Out’ in 2022, we returned to the Manchester quintet this year for their single ‘Jill’ and the aptly titled B-Side ‘TikTok Twat’. Recorded by a new line-up with a sound reminiscent of The Stranglers, the band’s leader and vocalist Richey tells us more about how it all came together. ‘Jill’ is inspired by a book of the same name by Philip Larkin while ‘Tik Tok Twat’ imparts the band’s feeling on social media. The music of Furrowed Brow remains as infectious as ever, as the band followed this up in the summer with their primal single and music video for ‘Outdoors Man’.
‘You know, I got quite emotional after that show because I was thinking what a lovely audience I have. The people who come to my shows are so positive and so supportive, I feel really lucky that my music seems to attract a thoughtful, kind human. There is definitely something about a church though that makes everyone a little more hushed and well behaved than in a venue with sticky floors, so that added to the revenant vibe we had on the night.’ - Roxanne de Bastion
Back in November 2022, we saw the last gig of a successful year of touring for Roxanne de Bastion. Her stripped back set with strings at London’s St. Pancras Old Church was recorded for a live album, released in 2023. We’d previously written about the career of de Bastion in 2021 prior to putting out her critically acclaimed album ‘You & Me, We Are The Same’, a large chunk of which is covered in the atmospheric live record.
After we witnessed her summer residency at Camden’s Green Note, Roxanne officially opened pre-orders for her new book, ‘The Piano Player of Budapest’, detailing the life of her Grandfather and a piano passed down through generations. Due for release in June 2024, for now only a handful of CDs remain for Roxanne’s live album – grab them from her Bandcamp page while you can!
“Lyrically it’s a vent song. It’s a bunch of situations I’ve been in, all linked together in one song, which will make more sense as to why in the context of my album. The original lyric idea I had for the original brat syndrome instrumental was completely different. What actually triggered the lyric concept change was the Amber Heard & Johnny Depp trial last year. When that was going on, it made me remember these other lyrics I had, so I restarted and went from there. That trial made me finish those lyrics. That’s why in the chorus I’m saying ‘hearsay I’m pissing my life away’ after talking about my Borderline Personality Disorder. It came out that she also had BPD in court, and there was the constant hearsay interruptions during that trial, so I played into that.” – Timmy
In early 2023, out of nowhere we received a modest email containing a musical experience unparalleled – the debut single from Timmy called ‘Spoiled Brat Syndrome’. Impossible to mentally process on the first listen, we took the liberty of detailing the complexity of the track for you. Timmy has crafted a masterpiece of a production, clocking at a mammoth 545 tracks so substantial that his computer’s processing power couldn’t handle it.
‘Spoiled Brat Syndrome’ also serves to showcase Timmy’s diverse musical range. In this one five-minute song, Timmy goes from drum ‘n’ bass to heavy metal, then switches to embody Eminem’s Slim Shady persona with jazzy piano, to an Axl Rose wailing chorus, finishing with a wall of children’s choir. There’s also a mother character and a Frenchman in the middle-eight, with every voice you hear in the song coming from the throat of Timmy. We really meant it when we called this ‘The Five Minute Opera’. In July, Timmy followed this up with ‘Ofsted Off Their Heads’ and a cover of the Connie Francis track ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ in October. His debut album is due in 2024 and we’re excited to hear what other sonic goodies he has in store!
“‘In Ruins’ was one of the first songs that I had written after my separation, the lyrics seemed to flow in such a poetic way for me. I’m a huge fan of Ben Gibbard and the way he writes music for Death Cab for Cutie. I’ve always wanted to write music like that and I think I’ve sort of achieved that with this EP. When I was writing lyrics for the chorus of ‘In Ruins’, the words ‘give me a brighter sound’ really resonated with me. The music I was writing for this EP already had quite dark undertones and I wanted to give it a sense of hope, so I called it ‘A Brighter Sound’.” – Nathaniel Sutton
In April, we premiered ‘The Metaphor’, the latest music video at the time from composer and multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Sutton. The Canadian songwriter drew inspiration from the heartbreak he endured during the pandemic, and his yearning to return to simpler times. The lyric, ‘Take me back to a place I know,’ serves as a bridge to incorporating home video footage of Nathaniel’s past, centering around an old television set he found on Facebook marketplace.
Later in June, we returned for a deeper dive into Nathaniel Sutton’s music for his EP ‘A Brighter Sound’. Drawing from the same subject matter and time period as EP-closer ‘The Metaphor’, we were struck by the optimism in Sutton’s music. Summing this work up, we said, ‘In less than twenty minutes, Nathaniel Sutton condenses a journey of turmoil and reset into five songs that work independently of each other, but provide a sense of clarity and greater meaning when listened to as a whole.’ Nathaniel Sutton continued his songwriting work in 2023 with the single ‘The Passenger’, and released an ambient album called ‘Happy Little Particles’ on cassette to close out the year.
‘This event went so much better than I ever could have hoped, and it was thanks to the hard work, love, and dedication put in by everyone involved. I was initially nervous that the turnout wouldn’t be what we expected, I didn’t want it to fall flat for the artists that had put so much work in, especially those that have never really performed live before, but I’m so glad I was worried about nothing. Everyone turned out to support one another, the chat was full of positivity and hype, and in the end we’ve even managed to triple our donation goal! I couldn’t have asked for more.’ – Cayt W
Beginning as a fun Twitter exchange to gather together artists for a live performance, songwriter and producer Cayt W ran with the idea. In just a couple of months, the idea turned into a livestreaming event that would support LGBTQ+ charity The Trevor Project. Featuring twelve artists, several time-zones and more than three hours of music, the Charitindie Collective raised more than $300 and plan to do it all again next year. The event has since sparked collaborations between artists, and some have even travelled across the United States to share the same gig bills!
Charitindie now has a Twitter page! Follow @charitindie for all the updates on the 2024 stream.
‘Each track was different and some came easier than others. The journey to redo the music was difficult at times but in all honesty it was worth it. Sometimes working through things that are difficult can be therapeutic and was definitely that way for all of us.’ – Sean Dowdell (Grey Daze)
Before Chester Bennington found fame as the lead vocalist for nu-metal band Linkin Park, he was the frontman for Arizona quartet Grey Daze. Our piece chronicling the history of Grey Daze from 1993 to 2023 became one of our top ten most viewed articles ever. We explore every line-up, their 1990’s album releases and their 2020’s re-recordings, right up to the moment before they returned to the stage with vocalist Cris Hodges. This career retrospective was told with the help of exclusive quotes from drummer and founding member Sean Dowdell. Grey Daze are set to tour the UK for the very first time in 2024, and we can’t wait to catch them in London!
“I actually have the exact moment I was inspired to write this song documented! I was freaking out one night, incredibly nervous about the end of high school and the possibility I wouldn’t get into my dream college. In a fervent spam post I wrote: ‘as much as i don’t want to admit it, the future is a complete mystery and yet it’s racing towards me like i’m a damsel tied to train tracks.’ While sometimes I start with melodies or chord progressions, this is one of the cases where a line came to me first and I instantly started writing. I didn’t end up getting into that school, by the way, but I got a great song out of the whole ordeal!” – Uncle Emmington
Having recorded a nine-song set for Charitindie, we reviewed the latest single and music video by Uncle Emmington called ‘No Cowboys Are Coming’. The track is taken from Em’s 2022 album ‘Alphabet Soup’, with Emmington having a particular flair for stripped back acoustic arrangements, violinist Joseph Guarisco helps bring tension to ‘Cowboys’. Everyone’s Favourite Uncle is one of the artists building community among the Charitindie Collective, collaborating with Delenn Jadzia and appearing on a Nashville bill with Copeland James. They’re currently writing new music, but we’re sure they’ll be back in 2024!
‘I don’t chase presets that directly reference other song arrangements very often, but sometimes it just happens because I’m a sponge and I recreate what I absorb to a greater or lesser extent, but through the lens of my particular style. A lot of the time, I will just flick through a trusted preset library and find something that feels right, whether it’s synths or drums, or as close an approximation as I can get, and then I’ll fuck around with adding effects; filter, EQ, distortion, reverb, etc. until the shape fits roughly what my brain is reaching for. That process is often more efficient for me than endless library browsing.’ – Rookes
Having been wowed by Rookes’ single ‘Consent’, the first to be taken from her debut album, we dived into the full production of ‘POPNOTPOP’ in May. The album keeps you on your toes stylistically, while maintaining a sound that is distinctly Rookes. Lyrically, this is a collection of personal experiences, of intimacy and being your best self unapologetically. Among our favourites on this album were the Austel collaboration ‘Tiptoe’ and the intense and atmospheric ‘CTL’. Our final words on the album were: ‘Everything is held in balance on ‘POPNOTPOP’, giving a glimpse of this producer’s life but inviting you to dance to it, bask in it, or have your breath taken away.’
‘I didn't really believe I could put an album together. It had always seemed like a massive goal I'd never accomplish. I nearly said no, because the thought of agreeing to make an album when I didn't think I could do it was really scary. I was afraid of letting them down. Frazer from Werra Foxma was so encouraging and it sounded like he really believed I could do it, so I pushed past that feeling and said yes. I'm so glad I did!’ – Cholly
Going right back to 2020, we’ve seen electronic producer Cholly go from strength to strength. Her debut album ‘Anomaly’ is her most daring and explosive work yet. The album of nine songs sees her songwriting ability growing, with our Q&A detailing how Scottish label Werra Foxma approached Cholly to make the record. ‘Anomaly’ culminates in the epic seven-minute ‘Story’ which Cholly later released in a stripped-back version.
A deviation from our regularly scheduled programming came in June when we stopped to celebrate the forthcoming re-record for Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ album. We returned to fifteen artists we’d interviewed previously to ask them what their favourite Taylor Swift song is and why. The answers were both varied across the Swift catalogue and gave an insight into many of the personal experiences these artists had undergone. With these artists hailing from differing genre backgrounds such as folk, electronic, ambient, pop and rock, the collection of interviews is a reminder of the vast appeal Taylor Swift has among the musicians of today.
In June and July, Moths and Giraffes reviewed its biggest gigs yet at Hyde Park’s British Summer Time in London. Our three separate engagements began with P!nk’s Summer Carnival, which featured a support slot from Gwen Stefani that could’ve easily been a headline performance in its own right. A three-hour show from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band was the spectacle of the second night, with a slick set from The Chicks and an energetic performance from Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls. Finally, a one-off gig from Billy Joel was the focus of the last night, which featured special guest Joe Jonas and rousing sets from Daryl Hall and Natasha Bedingfield. The sun was blazing, the queues for water were beyond belief, but the vibes were intensely good.
‘Right, so, when I first agreed to doing a show, I only had one song that I had written and released, and that song had been- A lot of the parts of it had been improvised and so it wasn’t necessarily something I could even recreate live. And so when I accepted the opportunity to play at Lara’s show, I decided to build something to suit the show, like, I had no other back catalogue to pull from so it was, create something now for then.’ – Maxie Cheer
The gigs in Hyde Park weren’t the only ones we reviewed that summer. After writing about his career so far in 2022, we headed down to Bar Doña in Stoke Newington for the debut solo performance of drummer Maxie Cheer. They’d put together an experimental set featuring samples of poetry, jazz excerpts, conversations and an ambient soundscape of their own design, all soundtracked by his continual drum performance. The set was unforgettable, the room was electric as everyone was sucked into a moment lasting just twenty-five minutes. Following the set, we caught up with Maxie to chat more about this chapter of their creativity.
‘My memory of writing Eco-Anxiety was definitely in those first few weeks of the pandemic when we were told to stay inside and stories of the pandemic's origin focussed on unnatural contact between humans and animals. Whether or not they were true, they reinforced my already existing fears about life on our planet. I genuinely felt at that time that how we were living then could be how things would stay for the rest of my life.’ – Mari Dangerfield
After reviewing her singles ‘1 Like’ and ‘Webcam’ in 2021, we caught up with Mari Dangerfield to chat about her new EP ‘Eco-Fever’. The four tracks deal with Mari’s feelings on the climate crisis, how it can be an overwhelming prospect when we’re bombarded with information on the subject constantly. Dangerfield also writes passionately for ‘Fashion Haul’, condemning the fast fashion trade and how this also contributes to the planetary decline. With gigs across London in 2023, Mari Dangerfield’s music has also been played on Frank Skinner’s Absolute Radio show, on BBC Radio Ulster and on BBC Radio 6 Music.
‘I believe it is important for us to remember that music is not a commodity, it is not just there as a given, and not all music is the same. There is an artist behind wanting to transmit something which he or she believes is worth transmitting. And the only way to receive that is by paying attention to it. I understand this is a challenge nowadays because doing many things at the same time is considered an asset, plus the bombarding of stimuli from our phones designed to distract. Precisely because of this, now more than ever, we need to stop and just listen to music.’ – Olec Mün
We all know the way we absorb music has changed. Not only are we not purchasing it in the quantities we were decades ago, but we’re also listening to it differently. This wasn’t lost on composer Olec Mün, whose piano album ‘Vögel’ we reviewed in 2021. He’s right that there are playlists for everything, and most of these relegate music to a background activity. With his album ‘While’, he sought to create music that was designed to be listened to while you go through life, whether this was ‘Growing Up’, ‘Facing Truth’ or ‘Letting Go’. Moths and Giraffes called ‘While’, ‘A lifetime of experience condensed into a short half-hour of superbly composed and performed pieces of music.’
‘We’ve always been super inspired by the Snarky Puppy live recording videos that they continue to put out and really wanted to try recording a whole album live. Having had such a long break from playing live and living in different countries we figured this was the most time effective, challenging and fun way to do it. And it really was!’ – Slowlight Quartet
With a seven-year break from recording and performing, Slowlight Quartet returned in 2022 for some writing sessions that led to the recording of an album in February this year. This time the jazz ensemble would be augmented by guitarist Athol Cassidy and vocalist YVA, helping the band to realise their new music in front of a live studio audience in Newcastle.
Releasing a few of these tracks over the course of 2023, it was the double A-Side of ‘Superbia’ and ‘Eveliina’ we turned our attention to in August. ‘Superbia’ is energetic and playful, while ‘Eveliina’ is a subtle musical score soundtracking an intimate moment. We concluded by saying: ‘The band are tight, rigid in their arrangements, but not so over-rehearsed as to remove the freshness of these engaging tracks.’
An AI rendering of the prompt ‘a moth and a giraffe’ by Dall-E Mini.
One thing you can’t help but notice in 2023 is the rise in different forms of AI technology. At the beginning of the year we were both wowed and horrified by the groundbreaking power of ChatGPT. The chatbot could write you essays on a subject of your choosing, interview you for an imaginary job, write a sales pitch, a poem, or lines of code resulting in a playable game. Plus any number of other prompts. And that was before the current version.
This wasn’t the only form of AI that was on the rise. AI photographs are part of the phenomenon, with the technology being incorporated into mobile phones to manipulate your own photography. AI music is also coming through, a quick search on YouTube will now land you on countless AI covers. Harnessing the learning capacity of AI to mimic the voices of musical (and non-musical) celebrities, you might find Lana Del Rey singing Adele’s ‘Skyfall’, or Darth Vadar covering Backstreet Boys. Frank Sinatra could be heard singing a Pixies track, or Johnny Cash doing his own version of ‘Barbie Girl’.
With this in mind, we asked some of the artists and producers in our Q&As what their thoughts on AI becoming increasingly intwined with music were. Here’s what they had to say.
‘Ah, mate, honestly my answer is short and boring: to me, AI is just another tool. Good or bad outcomes depend on how we use it, just like the internet or any other piece of tech. It’s arguable that to a certain extent we have been using AI for some time already, through things like musical sequencers and randomisers. So really, my feelings around it are pretty neutral.’ - Rookes
‘When AI was initially introduced to the world, I’ll admit I was intrigued. Now, with it being so convincing in terms of AI artwork, music, voices, deep fakes, it’s actually getting to be a little scary now. Being able to tell real life from AI is becoming more difficult by the day, I don’t think I’m onboard with this new AI era but it seems like it’s here to stay and will only become more advanced as time goes on. I just hope creators don’t get discouraged, because we still need artists, designers, musicians, etc. There’s still things AI can never replace.’ – Nathaniel Sutton
‘I haven't looked into AI in music much. I don't really understand the need, because to me, music is something you use to express yourself. I suppose you could use AI to help express yourself. I'm not sure if I know enough to comment! I might be avoiding the topic a tad.’ - Cholly
‘If AI hasn't created the music itself, or used someone else's property to do so, but been used to improve a workflow or enhance the sound of something, I think that's where it could be interesting. Apart from that, I think the risk of music becoming homogenized is only increased by these tools, particularly if they are widely adopted. I also don't like the problems it poses to ownership if the creator, or crucial idea generator, of a piece of music isn't even a human being.’ – Mari Dangerfield
“Not sure we’re much an authority on this! It will be fascinating to see where it goes but the AI development may go in directions we’re not even anticipating so I’m not sure what to think. I know some bands have used AI to help compose lyrics which can lead to interesting places. Who knows, maybe we’ll buy in and our next album will be ‘Elvis sings SLQ’.” – Paul Loraine (Slowlight Quartet)
More recently, a viral video spread of the first AI singer/songwriter called Anna Indiana, confirming the soulless nature by which AI operates, imitating existing art and reproducing it without the human experience that inspired it. It serves as a reminder of the vitality of genuine art, with hands on the controls and thought at the wheel.
“I’d always known that the world of entertainment often had some kind of age limit, but experiencing it myself really hit home in a different way. After releasing my first album I was so excited to move onto the next project. I was looking for a new team and started to reach out to people in the industry. I was often met with views that caught me off guard. I’d hear things like ‘It would be different if you were brand new’ - people never explicitly mentioned anything about my actual age, but there was always the suggestion that my 10 years of experience and catalogue of music was going to go against me for any future opportunities. I was encouraged not to mention achievements if they had happened more than 2 or 3 years ago, as if they were now completely irrelevant. Ultimately - I felt like if I had been 22 instead of 28 things would have been very different.” - Hannah Grace
Having written about Hannah Grace’s album ‘Remedy’ and her Christmas single ‘Just cause It’s Christmas (Always Been A Dreamer)’, a Twitter discussion about ageism in the music industry led to this latest interview with the songwriter. This piece focuses on her latest EP, the five-track ‘Devoted’, which features some of her most personal writing in her career so far. With this new music, Hannah Grace revealed she almost walked away from the music industry, but how she also found her place within it.
Following the completion of a successful tour of England and Scotland, Grace has announced an album preview show for May next year, which has already sold-out! A second date has been added, with 2024 shaping up to be another good one for Hannah Grace.
“I wrote most of the EP in December last year to help process the feelings I had towards a few people at the time. It’s about the thoughts and feelings associated with 'friend break-ups' and reclaiming the trauma that comes from bad friendships.” – Count to Ten with Nobody
Opening the Charitindie 2023 stream was a set from Count to Ten with Nobody, the musical project of songwriter and bedroom producer Edward Woodley. With an EP and single already under his belt in 2022, Count to Ten put out a new four-track EP entitled ‘Dont Tell Ur Friends About Me’ this summer. Anchored by his acoustic arrangements in the title track and the popular ‘Gingerbread’, the drum machine and bass-heavy ‘Pavement Dandelions’ was our runaway favourite in this collection of songs.
2023 was the closing chapter for Count to Ten with Nobody, with Edward Woodley deciding to take his music forward under the name Gym Socks. Follow his new socials @gym_socksss (Instagram) and @biglosergymsock (Twitter), with new music coming in 2024!
‘Missing Me resonates a lot with people and I understood that part of it had to do with the song being stripped back and letting my vocal take the focus, but also because it was penned in a single moment and was a raw thing in itself. I was sitting on I Have Seen and Grandeur for at least a couple of years and knew they were going to be on an EP together. Do Not Descend rounded it all out. Whereas HYPE MACHINE was me exploring sounds and textures, Delusions of Grandeur represents more of me at my core, really. It was kind of serendipitous that I had these songs ready and Missing Me had been received so well.’ – YVA
Returning to the voice of YVA in September, this time it was for her new solo EP, ‘Delusions of Grandeur’. We’ve consistently been blown away by YVA’s ability to convey raw emotion in her writing and vocal performances, and this EP was no exception. The mood of these three songs follow in the vein of YVA’s ‘Missing Me’, the final track from her essential listening ‘Hype Machine’ EP.
We caught up with YVA to chat about the long germination of ‘I Have Seen’, motherhood and preparing to play the Royal Albert Hall with Nitin Sawhney in October. Of the EP, we concluded by saying, ‘YVA cracks open her doubts in a long thread from the last vestiges of adolescence to pre-motherhood, finding that the burden of mental health isn’t an easy journey to navigate.’
‘I wrote a lot of this album while we were on our long road trip across the US when we moved from Pittsburgh to California! (Sorry I forgot you’re British, let me explain - a roadtrip is when you drive a car somewhere, and California and Pittsburgh are very far from each other. Also the Midwest is more North and East - don’t worry about it.)’ – Pacing
Dubbed ‘a book’ by the artist herself, one of our longest pieces on Moths and Giraffes examines the ever-evolving career of U.S. songwriter and bedroom producer Pacing. The first chapter takes in her work from 2020 to mid-2023, including her mixtape ‘hatemail’, passion project ‘Snake Facts’ and her singles before and since. But the main focus of the article is her album released in October called ‘Real Poetry Is Always About Plants and Birds and Trees and the Animals and Milk and Honey Breathing In The Pink But Real Life Is Behind A Screen’.
We go deep on the album’s road trip roots (routes), and include quotes from her co-producer Sun Kin. In our piece, we attempted to separate what is and isn’t real in the Pacing Music Band Nation expanded universe. ‘It’s Pacing’s notion that nothing is real, everything is made-up that makes this record exactly some of the most real pieces of art derived from her experience and inexperience in life.’
‘The Small Talk phone! I’ve had that since I was a kid; my family found it in an antique store and it used to actually work. It was in storage for ages, but I grabbed it for a photoshoot back in 2021 when we started recording. I thought it’d be the album cover back when I thought the recording process would go quickly (ha ha). It was a kind of random choice at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more perfectly it fit. A lot of the album is about trying and failing to communicate, things not coming out right. A broken vintage telephone is technically a tool of communication, but it’s an outdated and ineffective one. A performance of communication.’ – Copeland James
For our most recent piece, we returned to the music of Copeland James. Having previously written about their debut single ‘Restless In Rome’, and later for their contributions to Charitindie and our Taylor Swift article, it was a pleasure to go deeper for their debut album ‘Small Talk’. Released in the summer, we described the album as timeless. Written on piano, Copeland pulls together a team of talented peers to perform and record the album’s eight songs. The result is a soundtrack to the daydreams, the awkward glances and exchanges, James putting into words situations many of us have felt.
And that’s what struck us most about the music we reviewed in 2023. Being firmly post-pandemic now, it isn’t a surprise how much of the music centres around human connection. Whether it’s With Sun’s plea for peace in ‘If Her Gardens Burn’, the searching of the self in Evie Asio’s ‘Contending & Contention’ or Nathaniel Sutton’s ‘A Brighter Sound’, it’s a reminder of how important our connection to ourselves and each other is.
We hope we’ve connected with you in 2023 too. Thank you for reading our pieces, for sharing our posts, for all the feedback and encouragement. We hope you’ve lived a fulfilling year and will start the next one in a good place. Take care of yourselves, and continue loving the music you love.
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